


Necessity → something something → invention.

by Amand_r



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-07
Updated: 2011-04-07
Packaged: 2017-10-17 17:33:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/179293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When it was all said and done, Ianto had decided that he would never again doubt Owen's medical judgement, nor Jack's uncanny ability to come up with whatever was necessary, in this case a firehose and a fifty gallon drum of Zicam.  He would, however, forever be rueful of his mistaken certainty that operating a flame-thrower was much like using a camera: point and shoot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Necessity → something something → invention.

**Author's Note:**

> **Author's Notes:** Things shamelessly stolen from The Tick animated series. If you know the show, you'll see it. Immediately.  
>  Timeline: post Kiss Kiss. Thanks, joanwilder for taking my calls. Joanwilder: making sure all of Amand-r's fanfic is medically accurate since 1998. Srsly, she has to be tired of hearing me start the calls with, "So I have a medical question—if Harry Potter had an arm ripped off, how long would he have to tie it off before he passed out from blood loss?"
> 
> Written for 14valentines 2009, whose theme on day three was [Women's Health](http://community.livejournal.com/14valentines/110776.html) Honestly, what this has to do with women's health, I got nuthin'. It's the LETTER two.

_It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important._  
\--Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 

The alien something-or-other had been fairly easy to find (Jack called it a Thrakkerzog, and then Owen had deliberately misheard and asked 'Four yaks and a dog?' and then Gwen had corrected him with 'Four acts in a bog' and then Ianto had offered that they call it 'Susan,' and the conversation had pretty much ended when Jack had tossed a pile of papers at them all before swirling out of the Hub with his coat.). It had been breeding from the common cold virus, which, apparently, on certain days on the Rift, could mutate into alien life forms.

When it was all said and done, Ianto had decided that he would never again doubt Owen's medical judgement, nor Jack's uncanny ability to come up with whatever was necessary, in this case a firehose and a fifty gallon drum of Zicam.

He would, however, forever be rueful of his mistaken certainty that operating a flame-thrower was much like using a camera: point and shoot.

"You know, the barrel is hot right after you use it," Owen tells him when he finishes the last of the bandages. "So it doesn't make a good cudgel."

"Oh, I don't know, he looked good, swinging that about," Jack says merrily from above them, leaning against the rail that runs along the top of the autopsy theatre. "Why don't we get you an ASP, though? More practical. Less burny."

Ianto thinks of some cheeky reply and then tucks it away, because he doesn't do that, not quite, not in public. Actually, he allows himself three cheeky remarks aloud per day when they have an audience. In private. Well private is another matter entirely. Most things are, actually, a completely different matter, Ianto thinks as he turns his hands over and gives Owen a doubtful glare.

Owen smiles, but it's never a good smile. Never reassuring. "Yeah, that skin is just begging for an infection." He gestures at Ianto's hands, so covered in gauze that they might have been shoved in mittens. "You'll thank me later, when there isn't one." He raises the tube of cream in his hand and then reaches over and sticks it into Ianto's shirt pocket. "Sulfadine, every time you change the dressing, which should be three times at least." Ianto starts to ask something, but Owen rolls away towards the metal desk. "I can't believe I'm saying this again, but I'll write you a prescription."

"And not to belabour this," Ianto says, sucking in a breath and gritting his teeth. "But the pain?"

Owen continues writing. "Two scrips, then."

Ianto waves his hands in Owen's general direction, but mittens don't produce very offensive gestures. If Gwen were here, she would have jumped in for him, but she's with Tosh at the site, liasing with the police. Jack just looks ineffectively amused and smiling, rocking on the balls of his feet, back and forth; Ianto knows that he'll get no help from that arena. That is, until Jack realises that Ianto being handless might very well be the worst thing that's happened to the Hub since...well, ever since. It will take him a few seconds longer to think about how handless Ianto might affect areas of Jack's existence other than filing and coffee, but Ianto has no doubt that he'll get there eventually.

"I might as well be wearing gloves," he mumbles incredulously. "This is preposterous."

Owen tucks two slips of paper in with the cream and then begins to clean up, tossing a handful of the bloodied cold cloths into the bin. He glances at Ianto's hands and shrugs. "I wouldn't recommend it for a few days, but maybe later. Couldn't hurt, actually." Then he strips off his latex gloves and tosses them at the bin too, one of them flapping off the edge and falling to the floor instead. Ianto instinctively reaches out for it, to pitch it in properly when his hands come into his eyeline and he realises that this whole thing? Not going to work.

Jack offers to hold the cup of water to his mouth when he takes the first pain pill, and Owen has the decency to not snicker until he's far far away. The problem is that the Hub just isn't big enough.

***

It takes one side comment from Tosh about his new hands and a few overly sympathetic stares from Gwen for Ianto to decide that he is taking his new oven mitts home and sitting in front of the telly to watch reruns of...whatever is on in the middle of the day. Jack doesn't say anything, just says he should take two or three days off as he glances at the gauze monstrosities on his fingers, now covered with coffee stains and tea and ball point pen ink and what might be motor oil but whose appearance on his bandages had been so mysterious that Ianto didn't want to even think about what it is or how it got there. He grabs the instructions that Owen has printed out for him (a mercy, actually, as neither one of them wanted to have the whole exchange verbally. On the other hand, it frightens Ianto a little bit that Owen has pre-typed instructions for all manner of wounds in a folder on his desktop, this one in particular chillingly but professionally labelled 'critical burn treatment—outpatient care'.), trudges up to the tourist office for his personals, and then takes a taxi home, reflecting all the while on the sheer humor of possibly having an accident while driving with mitten hands.

And so he drinks three beers, opened mercifully by a neighbor who gives him a shake of his head and says, 'sorry mate, that'd be bloody irritating.' Ianto agrees. He takes a painkiller and wonders what will happen when it meets the alcohol in his system. Owen hadn't briefed him on that, or rather, he hadn't thought to. Using his teeth and the tips of his index and middle fingers, which mercifully escaped the blistering heat of the gun, he changes the bandages three times through the course of the evening: once for beer, once for a pizza disaster he's decided had been inevitable, and once for drunkenly poor aim into the toilet.

This is how he finds himself watching a shopping channel at six-thirty in the evening, mostly because his giant mitten hands are too big to press the buttons on the remote with any accuracy, and pressing with his fingers hurts, even through the gauze and the alcoholic-painkiller combination. He refuses to lick the control.

He is suddenly, and inexplicably fascinated by a closet organiser before it occurs to him that he is fascinated by a _closet organiser_ and how Lisa would have laughed at him. He stops that train at the station and instead wonders what seems to be interesting about the gloved hands running over the electroless chrome finish of the closet rails, hooking and unhooking special clasps and switches to compress more clothes than Ianto has ever owned into a closet so small he couldn't stuff Gwen in it, if he wanted.

Something about the gloves on the screen, the disembodied hands moving over the silver bar of the clothing rack to display its many useful features, stirs Ianto's cock. He sets his beer down on the coffee table with both wrists and stares at his crotch, then absentmindedly reaches for the band of his sweatpants before once again glimpsing his hands. The white cotton flexes with his hand. Minute movements in his palm send splinters of pain up his arm.

This obviously isn't going to work. He looks at his phone, blinking on and off on the table where he left it—blinking, because he can't press the buttons, buttons that are normally adequately large but at the moment are freakishly small.

He can't call Jack –though he would _never_ call Jack, not to his flat, not unless the Thrakkerzog was breeding in his bath or something—even if he wanted to, and there was no one else to call and say, 'Hallo, I seem to be handless right now. Could I entice you to come over and have me off?'

On the screen, the host has moved from hanging closet organisers and to floor cleaners. The disembodied hands lovingly stroke a tube-like vacuum attachment.

Ianto throws his head back and laughs at the ceiling. "Oh, for fuck's sake."

***

"Hey Mittens," Owen calls over, "Is there coffee?"

Ianto gives him a look and bangs the filter cup even more furiously against the side of the bin. Jack crosses his arms and watches Ianto's tan, gloved fingers hold the rim of the basket while he runs it under cold water to flush out the last of the grounds. His fingers get wet anyway. Wet cotton in a kitchen couldn't be sanitary.

It has been five days since the burning incident, and six since Ianto has been able to wank properly, not counting the horrible frottage incident with an old stuffed animal that Lisa had given him for his birthday five years ago, an incident which had prompted the shameful hiding of the smiling stuffed panda under the bed and a brief headbanging session against the wall. Suzie had once referred to Ianto's occasional comedic headbanging as 'Torchwood therapy.' Jack had probably said something about banging in general, but they had all probably just ignored him.

However, Jack is obviously thinking about banging again as he leans against the kitchenette counter and makes a small show of freeing a coffee filter from the stack for him. Ianto almost weeps with relief. The filters are the one thing he cannot cope with in his routine.

He could only stay home for a full day before the shopping channel convinced him that he needed to be elsewhere, and so he'd dressed and asked his neighbor to tie a selection of ties for him (his neighbor only knows the four-in-hand. Ianto usually wears the half-Windsor or the oriental, but beggars cannot be choosers. It is a miracle he managed his belt loops.). No one would have minded if he had gone to work in denims and a jumper, especially not Jack, but Torchwood Two had been very clear that the tourist office was to be manned by someone _not_ wearing casual clothing, so Jack would have been sent up there. That had been previously decided, based on trial and error, as The Worst Possible Scenario Ever, aside from the Tosh and the Killer Pasta Maker Incident. Ianto sighed; some things were not meant to be, like casual day in the office and Tosh and pasta primavera.

Ianto had made do with mitten hands until he had managed to procure the gloves that he is wearing, cheap cotton things that stretch over his dressings and allow him some modicum of movement.

"Those are kind of sexy," Jack says low enough for only Ianto to hear. That's not like Jack, who generally prefers to flirt with everyone in the Hub in unison, even though Ianto is the only one who falls for it.

He snorts in disgust. "They're a mess already," he says. It's not that he's obsessive compulsive, but he prefers his clothing to be clean, and he is starting to notice that they all take for granted the sheer amount of filth that they put their hands in every day and never see on their skin. He also appreciates the washability of skin.

"Have you ever thought of, I dunno, _not_ making the coffee, then?" Jack asks, flattening a filter with one hand and poking holes in it with his fingers.

Ianto rolls his eyes. "I take it you'd prefer Starbucks for the next two weeks, then, Sir."

Jack raises the filter to his face a moment and peers through the holes he's made. "Oh good god no. Say," he adds. "What about something darker, you know, something not white or...whatever that is."

"Natural," Ianto tells him, taking the filter and tossing it in the bin. With his luck, someone would try to use it in the coffeemaker and he'd end up with grounds in the machine's delicate piping. Again.

Jack glances at the gloves. "Why does everyone on this planet seem to think that tan is natural?" He shoves his hands in his pockets. "Well, I had a girlfriend tell me once that beige is the default colour of the universe." He glances over and smiles. "Made me use body paint and chant about..something. Turns out she was just _really_ crazy."

Ianto sighs and lowers his hands to the counter, resting the backs of them on the Formica and turning his head to glare at Jack. "So, this jaunt down physical stimuli lane means, what?"

Jack pushes off from the edge of the counter and strolls away. "Black cotton?"

Ianto doesn't pause as he uses a disposable chopstick to pick the measuring cup out from the tin of grinds and tentatively pluck it out with two fingers. Natural isn't quite working, actually. He can still see splashes of brown from Owen's tea earlier. "You mean black cotton gloves, like a funeral director." It is a statement, because he thinks that if Jack hears it come out of someone else's mouth, he will understand how creepy it is.

Jack stops then. "Oh, right." He spins back to Ianto, but keeps walking backwards. "Maybe just really really really really dark blue."

Ianto turns away and flips open the steam wand, even though it is obvious that he isn't steaming anything, just to drown Jack out. Sometimes he has the _worst_ ideas.

He's still thinking about Jack's shite idea when Jack presses the black gloves in his hands as he walks out the door to lunch, waving over his shoulder and promising to bring something or other back for Ianto, something that doesn't have cumin in it.

Ianto tries the gloves on, and admittedly they are much nicer than the ones he currently has. The ones he obtained a few days ago are ladies' moisturiser gloves, extra large and stretchy, but not too embarrassing as they have no feminine lines and are not trimmed with butterflies or ponies or anything. But they are thin and fragile and he's already ripped a few pair of them on filing cabinets.

The black gloves that Jack has given him fit perfectly, despite their macabre colour, and they have little buttons on the wrist vents, manly buttons, Ianto notices with relief. They are thicker than the ones Ianto is used to, but they accommodate the light dressings that he is putting on under the gloves (the burns have to be kept sort of moist and buffered so that they don't dry up, though he sleeps without gloves at night so that they don't develop what Owen had cheerfully referred to as 'jungle rot.'). He does the buttons and flexes his fingers in the minute increments that he has grown somewhat accustomed to, a cupping gesture that makes him look like the Queen waving from the motorcade.

The little tag inside is some generic company name that Ianto knows supplies the military, and he wonders when Jack ever had occasion to wear his dress black gloves. To how many funerals? Had these gloves reached out to scratch a handful of dirt to toss onto a fresh grave? How many graves?

Ianto splays the fingers of one hand and looks through them out the window of the tourist office. He takes a painkiller. He bangs the backs of his hands on the counter in a drumming motion while he reads the Thrakkerzog report –Tosh is nothing if not grammatical and she treats his embarrassingly idiotic flame-thrower moment with grace and subtlety—and then he stacks a few of Jack's handwritten reports in the notebook computer stand and opens a new file. He's let the typing pile up for the past three days, and he's going to be there a while.

He is still typing when Jack reappears, a plastic bag full of take away cartons in one hand. He lifts it in greeting. "They had those jilebi things you like," he says, setting the cartons on the counter and grinning. "I bought you scads."

Ianto rolls the chair over to the front desk. "Marvelous." He reaches for the bag and stops when he sees Jack's eyes riveted to his hands. "What?"

Jack smiles and crosses the few steps to the door, flipping the deadbolt and the sign before raising his brows. "Nothing," he replies innocently.

Contrary to what the others might think, he and Jack don't have sex like rabbits, or coathangers or whatever all over the Hub every night after everyone else has left. He knows that they think this because well, Tosh has an imagination, and Gwen has seen them and Owen is just extremely randy. All. The. Time.

This is what Ianto is thinking when he is sitting stiffly at the tourist office desk, a container of tikka masala open in front of him and the CLOSED sign in the locked door. He is also thinking about what to do with his hands that won't hurt, since Jack is currently on his knees under the desk and sucking Ianto so hard that Ianto's brain flashes to the shopping channel show he saw a few nights ago.

So he sits there, partially worried that one of the others will walk in on them, partly concerned about his hands and the rest of his brain, about ninety percent of it taken up with articulate trains of thought such as, 'FUCK FUCK FUCK OH YES, OH GOD, FUCK YES, OH OH.' So much of his brain is taken with that thread of thought that when he grasps Jack's hair through the gloves and curls his hands, it takes him a full five seconds for shrieking pain to stab into his fingers, and too late, by that time he is coming, and Ianto knows that from now on, in years to come, he will always associate blow jobs at the tourist desk with mindstabbingly painful pleasure.

Jack lifts his head and takes Ianto's frozen hands from his hair, smoothing them out a bit, uncramping the fingers and kissing them through the cloth. Ianto lets him fix him up, zip his flies and buckle his belt, tuck his shirt in. Jack crawls out from under the desk and straightens Ianto's tie. It is then that Ianto notices that his hands, still burning and almost throbbing, are soaked through in places with clear fluid.

Jack makes a pained noise in the back of his throat and undoes the buttons on the gloves, starting to peel them away, inside out. The bandages underneath are wet, and not in a good way. Ianto can't look away from them. He wishes that he could just get a whole new pair of hands, as if he could unscrew them at the wrists and attach new ones in the manner of Captain Hook. He can see the attraction of attachments for another split second.

"I'm sorry about your gloves," he thinks to say, but Jack just leads him down to the autopsy bay by his wrists.

"They'll wash."

"Jones," Owen says later as he rubs Sulfadine on Ianto's hands with a gentleness that belies his tone, "Please, no more handjobs for a while." He smirks.

Ianto wonders if the pain would be worth it to box Owen's ears. Instead, Jack rests a hand on his shoulder and sticks his tongue into his cheek, eyes wicked even though they are looking elsewhere.

***

Another week finds Ianto exploring the gloves section of every clothing store in Cardiff proper. And some other places. He manages to look up a gentlemen's clothing shop that sells opera and black tie gloves, and even picks up a pair of fleece lined leather gloves for working on the SUV, which has sustained some muffler damage from a high speed chase the night before last, in which Tosh and Gwen mistook a group of underground Mexican wrestlers for aliens and had gone on a madcap romp through the cobbled part of town before ending up on a curb that was too high for them to simply drive off of. Ianto only knows all of this because he looked up the CCTV footage after he heard about it, and he is saving it for later when compiling clips for the annual Torchwood seminar on safe driving practices.

Well, that's what he's threatening to do, anyway.

Mostly, he's learning about how much Jack loves gloves shoved into his pants, and of course, what they do once they're in there. Ianto, after a few experiments himself, completely understands the lure.

Ianto presses two fingers into Jack's arse as he swallows him, and the leather makes that delicious groaning noise that leather makes when it moves; Ianto can smell it even over the ridiculous raspberry scented lube that he had covered his hand with, despite Jack's assurances that he didn't need it. In the back of his head he makes a mental note to secret something more appropriate somewhere in the car, in a wheel well or under a floorboard (as if lube is the new illegal narcotic or something, now really), anywhere but the glove box.

One of Jack's hands is feather light on his head, and the other slams down on the bonnet in an echoing thunderclap in the garage; his accent is harsh and loud when he calls Ianto's name and several other words that intone some deity from a far away planet. Ianto twists his fingers and smiles around Jack, humming lightly to himself. He pulls back to lick down the length of Jack's cock and blow on it a little, and when he swallows him again, Jack comes, bending back so far that he almost hits his head off the bonnet. Ianto pulls his hands back and sits on the mechanics' dolly, sparing a harsh look at the lube on the ground before kicking it towards the bin.

"What the hell was that?" Jack says, wiping himself with a clean rag and tossing it in the bin before tucking himself away and crouching down in front of Ianto, his frame still using the side panel of the SUV for support.

Ianto smiles and waves his fingers, still shiny with lube.

"No no, the other hand," Jack laughs and reaches out for Ianto's other gloved hand, taking the tin and holding it up. "Altoids, Mr. Jones?"

Ianto shrugs. "They were in the glove box with the lube."

***

Ianto is balancing the books with the new software Archie from Torchwood Two has sent to him when Jack's hands slip over his shoulders, running up onto his neck. Ianto smells the powder and frowns minutely. He can tell from the feel and odour that Jack has got hold of a pair of Owen's disposable autopsy gloves.

He doesn't look away from the screen and instead types in a new entry. "Just keep on walking," he says. Jack's hands still, and then he sighs and retreats back to the lower levels of the Hub.

Ianto rolls his eyes; he has _standards_.

***

"Oh god," Jack groans in the arboretum when Ianto reaches around and grabs Jack's cock in his hand, the cashmere sliding up and down the length of it and lower to cup his balls. Jack bends forwards, back arching concave, and his hands shake the metal tray that he is using for support. Ianto holds onto Jack not by the other hand, but with his other arm hooked up and around Jack's shoulder. Something pink and floral keeps smacking him in the face, but all he smells is Jack as he bends down and trails his tongue up the nape of Jack's neck. He pulls out and thrusts back in again quickly, his gloved hand kneading Jack's balls as gently as he can.

"When," Jack says hoarsely a few minutes later as they sprawl on the mat they spread on the floor when they use the arboretum for sex, "did you get those? You weren't wearing them today."

Ianto lifts his head and examines the too-small, green glove on his hand. It is wet and the weave is stretched to the breaking point. "Hrm. Lost and found box." He lays his head back down on Jack's thigh and props his other hand under his head to keep his weight off Jack a little.

Jack weaves his fingers in with Ianto's, but doesn't clasp; the fingers are still too raw under the material. "I think Suzie had a pair like that."

Ianto brings the glove closer to his face and peers at it, as if he can see molecules of Suzie left on them, as if they would tell him that they belonged to her. "Well, if they're hers," he decides aloud finally, "I like to think she'd be happy with where they turned up."

Jack laughs and leans back against the metal tray, which is on rollers and starts across the room, sending them falling backwards.

***

The rubber gloves are bright and yellow and frighteningly unsettling (and also, not surprisingly, imprinted with floral patterns). He's already washed all of the dishes and then the gloves themselves, just to be thorough.

Jack takes in his hands and raises his brows. "That's, uh."

Ianto snaps the bottom edge of one of the gloves against his skin and wiggles his fingers. "There's going to be some mild discomfort."

Jack sits back in his chair and grins. "Promises, promises."

***

The weapon is light in his hand, and he thinks to himself that this is a joke. It is small in his palm, his palm of skin and muscle, not cotton/latex covered. It has only been four weeks since he was Sir Mitten Hands, and this is his first day completely in the raw, as it were, even though Owen tells him that he might prefer to keep a few pair around just in case he feels discomfort.

Ianto thinks again that he has never been so happy to be free of gloves in his life.

The ASP is molded in his grip, and he wonders what will happen if he tests it. But it has been placed on his desk, in plain sight, a little red bow taped on the rounded tip of it. He stands back from the coffee machine, thinking that if he manages to wreck the cafetiere then Jack might regret his little joke of a gift. A joke that Ianto plans on mastering, right here, right now, because he has been secretly reading up on the weapon ever since Jack had mentioned it.

The idea appeals to him, Ianto understands, because the ASP can be collapsed into itself, compacted, tightened and slipped into a pocket in the manner of a wallet, a set of keys, a stopwatch. If he hadn't watched the videos of its brutality on youtube, he might have been convinced that it is a gentleman's weapon.

That rather appeals to him too. The misconception of it all.

He snaps his wrist out with an economy of movement, not looking, but feeling the metal fly out of the weapon, out of itself, clicking into place, the electroless finish gleaming. At its longest, it can't be more than sixteen inches, but he knows more than most that it isn't the size of the weapon, but the hand it's in. When he raises it to look at the polished surface, he thinks of organisers and Lisa and how much she loved the colour silver. He wonders what the grip would feel like through a layer of cotton.

"Holy fuck, Mister Steed, what the hell are you going to do with that?" Owen says from his desk, though his voice contains a small hint of fear when Ianto brings the baton around with another whip and slams it on the metal rungs of the Hub cage. He feels, more than sees, Jack in the window above him, knowing that he has heard Owen. He wonders if Jack will give him a bowler hat next.

He uses his fresh and new palm to push the ASP back into itself, feeling the snicktclick of it catching into place. Leave it to Jack to have splurged on the one with the safety.

And glancing up at Jack's face as he leans on the frame of the window, he knows that was just what he had in mind.

 

END


End file.
